New One-Hour Wargames hex grid variant for ECW....

Hats, Horses and Hexes!

Personally I blame Kaptain Kobold. I'm sure I have said that somewhere before! I have been quietly working on a Napoleonic version of my hex grid variant of the OHW for WSS. I really want to be able to use some guys with neat hats and start painting some plastic 1/72 types.

Rupert, man with dog

Needless to say this was going on in the background because I was having a ponder about some of the concepts that the good Kaptain had worked into his GNW rules. He has now come up with a OHW version for the ECW. I think these are brilliant. They take the OHW into the territory that most wargamers think of as "proper rules" but without any of the usual nonsense.

So, I have taken my draft Napoleonics OHW hex grid and chucked them out and started again with the ECW. You can find them here. I have loads of old Heroics and Ross 6mms to paint up and this seems like a good project for the Xmas holidays.

More cool than something really cool....

Airfix battles!

I came across this by accident. 

Due out next year, this is a card focused game of tactical combat using counters on a square board. Alternatively use your Airfix soldiers and tanks. A "Collectors rule book" converts the rules to a full able top wargame. Check it out here. 

The publisher, Modiphius, looks like a serious player. As this game set covers US paras and Germans in Normandy, this almost looks like a combination of M44, Operation Squad and Heroes of Normandie. I don't know the price point but it looks very tempting.

Morvalonga.....

its a cool country!

Given my Somewhere in Africa adventure I was overcome with joy to find the fully realised country of Morvalonga. Check this out here.

Here are the Pink Panthers...

The Leopard Girls....

The Tarzan people....

It is clear that Gonzonia has some competition. Well done the Inch High Club!

Somewhere in Africa again....

Things are a foot!

Given the events this weekend I am not feeling cheery and to a large extent feel morally compromised by my current project. I nearly decided not to post this and leave it for another day. The problem with leaving what people refer to as a decent interval is that it implies that if you give it long enough everyone forgets. I'm not comfortable with that as a response.

My response is to carry on with my project but in a responsible and informed manner. I recommend the Institute for the Study of War as a good place to start. 

I have been working on updating some cheap toys that my children no longer play with. The fact they are HMMWVs and pretty much 1/72 scale is great. Here we have one in US desert livery and two in the unique Gonzonia Defence Forces (GSF) tiger camouflage. I'm sure I have seen that somewhere before but can't quite place it.

I'll be using these with FiveCore Company Command rules, converted to hexes of course! That is next on my list.

Team Yankee...

Deja vu all over again!

There is plenty of promotional wind blowing from the direction of Battlefront for their new game Team Yankee.

My bedroom in the 1960s before I discovered girls...

I do find it very strange that a large group of people are exploring something that we all got wrong, completely. As a kid I remember the air raid sirens being tested for the four minute warning and the public information films that scared the crap out of me. There was, of course, nothing else on TV during the day after Playschool! The War Game, a docu drama intended for BBC1, had been banned in the mid-1960s when it came out for fear of damaging national morale and could only be seen in a movie theatre.

The nuclear war stuff seemed to peter out in the 1970s only to be kick-started again by Reagan.  I do recall watching another TV docu drama, Threads, a very convincing story of WW3 and a nuclear attack on the UK (Sheffield actually). That was 1984.

I remember the slew of books that came out in the 1980s about the cold war going hot. I read most of them. My personal favourites, which are still on my shelves, are Red Thrust by Steven Zaloga and First Clash by Kenneth Macksey. There is a great article on Breakthrough Assault giving an overview of these books and others. Well worth reading and I may be tempted to buy into the Harvey Black trilogy....

The book Team Yankee by Harold Coyle came out in 1987. I still have this. Although only slightly better written than a telephone directory, it did have enormous credibility being written by a US officer and being published by top military publisher Praesidio.

The top thing about the book is that it spawned a wargame by GDW....Team Yankee!

As you can see, I have still got this. It is pristine and I have been saving it for a rainy day. The great thing about the game is that it allows you to play out the scenarios from the book. It is tactical level with individual squads, weapons teams and tanks. It represents the pinnacle of cold war US ground forces with Abrams, M113s and TOWs against evil Soviets in T72s and BMP1s (and even BTR60s, I had a few Roco BTRs in the dim and distant). 

The game has got four nice maps. The rule book has also got data for a range of non-US armies including the UK. The actual counters are a bit crap to say the least. Some of the rules are a bit clunky but for someone like me brought up on Panzer Blitz they seemed to be bang on the money. They also included a really good overwatch rule (units taking up firing positions in their own turn to be able to execute opportunity fire in their opponent's). 

I still have the book as well and really do intend to play through the game one day while reading it! Of course, the question is, why haven't I played it before now? The answer is October War. An SPI magazine game from 1977 about the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. It blew apart all previous tactical games for me and I can still recall the massive campaign game I played with my gaming bud in the late 1970s. I eventually won as the Syrians, by a very fine whisker, and I'm not a natural winner either. 

This is a period piece that brings back lots of happy memories. And the most interesting thing is that in 1989 Reagan's policy of spending the Soviets into disaster had succeeded and the evil empire fell apart. Job done against everyone's expectations, including mine. The game went into the cupboard.

Now the evil empire is back again its probably time to dust it off!